Rest…
leave behind fear, hope, anger, spilled milk.
Take silence only.
Sky, wind. Sunrise after the rain.
Forget the rest.
Sleep, Harris.
Rest from yourself.
— Reverend West (Vondie Curtis-Hall), Raymond & Ray (Apple TV+, 2022)
Rest…
leave behind fear, hope, anger, spilled milk.
Take silence only.
Sky, wind. Sunrise after the rain.
Forget the rest.
Sleep, Harris.
Rest from yourself.
— Reverend West (Vondie Curtis-Hall), Raymond & Ray (Apple TV+, 2022)
As I wash the dishes I am filled with an invigorating emptiness and amuse myself with the soap bubbles. The water comes out of the tap with a rhythm that demands music. I accompany it with bursts of whistling and a phrase from a nondescript popular song. I play with the lather, which is like a cloud in which seasonal colours gleam then fade. I grasp the cloud in my hand and distribute it over the plates, glasses, cups, spoons and knives. It inflates as drops of water run over it. I scoop it up and make it fly through the air and it laughs at me, and my sense of having time to spare increases. My mind is blank, as indifferent as the noonday heat. But images of memories descend from afar and land in the bowl of water, neutral memories, neither painful nor joyful, such as a walk in a pine forest, or waiting for a bus in the rain, and I wash them as intently as if l had a literary crystal vase in my hands. When I am sure they’re not broken, they return safely to where they came from in the pine forest, and I remain here. I play with the soapy lather and forget what is absent. I look contentedly at my mind, as clear as the kitchen glass, and at my heart, as free of stains as a carefully washed plate. When feel completely sated with invigorating emptiness, I fill it with words of interest to nobody but me: these words!
— Mahmoud Darwish, “A coloured cloud” in “A River Dies of Thirst“
Notes:
The slow overture of rain,
each drop breaking
without breaking into
the next, describes
the unrelenting, syncopated
mind. Not unlike
the hummingbirds
imagining their wings
to be their heart, and swallows
believing the horizon
to be a line they lift
and drop.
—Jorie Graham, from “Mind,” in Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts.
Notes: Poem via The Vale of Soul-Making. Photo: pan xiaozhen @zhenhappy via Unsplash
The part of life
devoted to contemplation
was at odds with the part
committed to action…
Life, my sister said,
is like a torch passed now
from the body to the mind.
Sadly, she went on, the mind is not
there to receive it.
— Louise Glück, from “Autumn” in “Winter Recipes from the Collective: Poems” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 26, 2021)
Portrait: Louise Gluck via The Atlantic
…In the 25 years since I graduated from college, such demands have relentlessly ratcheted up. The quantity and complexity of the mental work expected of successful students and professionals have mounted; we’ve responded by pushing ever harder on that lump of gray matter in our heads.
The result has not been a gratifying bulking up of our neural “muscle.” On the contrary, all the mental effort we’ve mustered over the past year has left many of us feeling depleted and distracted, unequal to the tasks that never stop arriving in our inboxes. When the work we’re putting in doesn’t produce the advertised rewards, we’re inclined to find fault with ourselves. Maybe we’re insufficiently gritty; maybe, we think, we’re just not smart enough. But this interpretation is incorrect. What we’re coming up against are universal limits, constraints on the biological brain that are shared by every human on the planet. Despite the hype, our mental endowment is not boundlessly powerful or endlessly plastic. The brain has firm limits — on its ability to remember, its capacity to pay attention, its facility with abstract and nonintuitive concepts — and the culture we have created for ourselves now regularly exceeds these limits.
The escalating mental demands of the past quarter-century represent the latest stage of a trend that has been picking up speed for more than 100 years. Starting in the early decades of the 20th century, school, work and even the routines of daily life became more cognitively complex: less grounded in the concrete and more bound up in the theoretical and abstract. For a time, humanity was able to with this development, resourcefully finding ways to use the brain better. As their everyday environments grew more intellectually demanding, people responded by upping their cognitive game. Continual engagement with the mental rigors of modern life coincided in many parts of the world with improving nutrition, rising living conditions and reduced exposure to pathogens. These factors produced a century-long climb in average I.Q. scores — a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect, after James Flynn, the political philosopher who identified it.
But this upward trajectory is now leveling off. In recent years, I.Q. scores have stopped rising or have even begun to drop…Some researchers suggest that we have pushed our mental equipment as far as it can go. It may be that “our brains are already working at near-optimal capacity,” write the neuroscientist Peter Reiner and his student Nicholas Fitz in the journal Nature. Efforts to wrest more intelligence from this organ, they add, “bump up against the hard limits of neurobiology.” This collision point — where the urgent imperatives of contemporary life confront the stubbornly intractable limits of the brain — is the place where we live at the moment, and rather unhappily. Our determination to drive the brain ever harder is the source of the agitation we feel as we attempt the impossible each day.
Fortunately, there is an alternative. It entails inducing the brain to play a different role: less workhorse, more orchestra conductor. Instead of doing so much in our heads, we can seek out ways to shift mental work onto the world around us and to supplement our limited neural resources with extraneural ones. These platforms for offloading, these resources for supplementation, are readily available and close at hand…
We, too, extend our minds, but not as well as we could. We do it haphazardly, without much intention or skill — and it’s no wonder this is the case. Our efforts at education and training, as well as management and leadership, are aimed principally at promoting brain-bound thinking. Beginning in elementary school, we are taught to sit still, work quietly, think hard — a model for mental activity that will dominate during the years that follow, through high school and college and into the workplace. The skills we develop and the techniques we are taught are mostly those that involve using our individual, unaided brains: committing information.
The limits of this approach have become painfully evident. The days when we could do it all in our heads are over. Our knowledge is too abundant, our expertise too specialized, our challenges too enormous. The best chance we have to thrive in the extraordinarily complex world we’ve created is to allow that world to assume some of our mental labor. Our brains can’t do it alone.
— Annie Murphy Paul, from “How to Think Outside Your Brain (nytimes.com, June 11, 2021)
When bodies are discussed, especially in popular culture, it has often meant a very circumscribed set of themes, largely to do with what the body looks like or how to maintain it at a pinnacle of health. The body as a set of surfaces, of more or less pleasing aspect. The perfect, unattainable body, so smooth and gleaming it is practically alien. What to feed it, how to groom it, the multiple dismaying ways in which it might fail to fit in or measure up. But the element of the body that interested me was the experience of living inside it, inhabiting a vehicle that was so cataclysmically vulnerable, so unreliably subject to pleasure and pain, hatred and desire…
I wanted to formalise my understanding of the body, and I was fascinated too by the idea that it might have its own language, distant from speech but just as eloquent and meaningful, composed of symptoms and sensations rather than words… Over the next two years, I drew every bone, muscle and organ in the body, memorising their functions and their names, right down to the tiny bones of the hand: lunate and pisiform, named for their resemblance to moons and peas. On sheets of butcher’s paper, I mapped the metabolic transformations that went on inside the miniature factory of each cell. At the beginning I had only the crudest notion of how the body worked, but I struggled gamely on, fascinated and a little appalled by how much of my life happened beneath the Plimsoll line of conscious control. Gradually it all came into focus. The body was a device for processing the external world; a conversion machine, hoarding, transforming, discarding, stripping for parts.
— Olivia Laing, Everybody: A Book About Freedom (W. W. Norton & Company, May 4, 2021)
must you finish a thought? is it not enough to
Source: yelenabelovas. Image via bytheslice
Here are some key attributes of the voice in my head. I suspect they will sound familiar.
In short, the voice in my head—and perhaps also yours—can be an a**hole.
— Dan Harris, from “Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-to Book“
Notes:
But what I’m only now starting to fully understand is that this is an inside job. It only works if I believe. I’ve always been confident, positive, doggedly determined; but doubt is beginning to mitigate my conviction. Who am I to think I can accomplish this, when so many have struggled with similar setbacks; some with Parkinson’s, some with the aftermath of spinal surgery? I may be the only one who has taken on this particular two-headed beast…
I have to learn to walk again; to reclaim my mobility, remaster my motion. I consider this fundamental to my therapy — for me, it all starts and ends with walking. And I understand that it’s more complicated than that. So many tiny disciplines have to be observed, and neglected muscles and ligaments need to be restored. I’m exhausted by the effort I’ve already put in at Johns Hopkins, and daunted by how much work I still have to do. It’s like being nibbled to death by ducks.
Back in the days of carefree ambling, I would have considered the topic of walking to be rather pedestrian. Now the acts of stepping, strolling, hiking, and perambulating have become an obsession. I watch Esmé gliding through the kitchen, grabbing an apple while opening the fridge door for a coconut water, closing it with a quick shift of her hip and pirouetting out the swinging door at the other end of the room. Down in the lobby, my neighbor and her daughter are quickstepping to catch a taxi. I spy on a man walking with a slight limp, which he counterbalances with a bag of groceries. I secretly watch the way they all move. Easy, breezy, catlike, or with a limp, every one of them is far better at it than me. It may be that the most difficult, miraculous thing we do, physically, is to walk…
It’s tough. With PD and the aftermath of the surgery, something as simple as remaining upright is often sabotaged by a rogue army of misfiring neurons. I try to stay organized. I have memorized a litany of admonitions, not unlike my golfer’s list of swing thoughts: Keep my head centered over my hips; hips over my knees; no hyperextending; stay in line with my feet; eyes forward; shoulders back; chest out; lead with the pelvis. All of this kinetic vigilance can dissolve in a nanosecond of panic, or come apart with some other distraction. A tiny nervous jolt or spasm, and like a house of cards in a sudden gust of wind, the only messages that make it through the debris are: Don’t fall. Don’t fall. Don’t fall …
— Michael J. Fox, No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality (Flatiron Books, November 17, 2020)
This book is dedicated to the voices in my head, the most remarkable of my friends.
And to my wife, who lives with us.
— Fredrik Backman, the opening dedication to his new book titled “Anxious People: A Novel” (Atria Books, September 8, 2020)
Notes:
Thinking about swifts has made me think more carefully about the ways in which I’ve dealt with difficulty. When I was small I comforted myself with thoughts of layers of rising air; later I hid myself among the whispers of recorded works of fiction. We all have our defences. Some of them are self-defeating, but others are occasions for joy: the absorption of a hobby, the writing of a poem, speeding on a Harley, the slow assembly of a collection of records or seaside shells. ‘The best thing for being sad,’ said T. H. White’s Merlin, ‘is to learn something.’ All of us have to live our lives most of the time inside the protective structures that we have built; none of us can bear too much reality. We need our books, our craft projects, our dogs and knitting, our movies, gardens and gigs. It’s who we are. We’re held together by our lives, our interests, and all our chosen comforts. But we can’t have only those things, because then we can’t work out where we should be headed.
— Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights (Grove Press, August 25, 2020)
Photo Salvi Danes, (Barcelona) (via Your Eyes Blaze Out)
Like a bird with a broken wing
that has traveled through wind for years.
like a bird unable to endure
tempest and wind
the evening falls…
Now I long for a little quiet
all I want is a hunt on a hill
or near a seashore
all I want in front of my window…
The evening would fall
the flocks would echo descending to their fold
like some quiet simple happy thought
and I would lie down to sleep
because I wouldn’t have
even a candle to light,
light,
to read.
— George Seferis, from “Five Poems by Mr. S. Thalassinos” from “Hampstead” in George Seferis: Collected Poems, 1924-1955
Notes:
We are looking for new spaces, but what we are really looking for is retreat, clarity, to escape our internal chaos.
For the days not to feel glued together.
— Kate Zambreno, Drifts: A Novel (Penguin, May 19, 2020)
Notes:
Source: Hartley Lin (formerly known by the pseudonym Ethan Rilly) is a cartoonist based in Montreal, Canada. Young Frances, the first collection from his ongoing comic book Pope Hats, won the 2019 Doug Wright Award for Best Book. He has drawn for The New Yorker, The Hollywood Reporter, Slate, Taddle Creek and HarperCollins. (via thisisn’thappiness)
Where does it start? Muscles tense. One leg a pillar, holding the body upright between the earth and sky. The other a pendulum, swinging from behind. Heel touches down. The whole weight of the body rolls forward onto the ball of the foot. The big toe pushes off, and the delicately balanced weight of the body shifts again. The legs reverse position. It starts with a step and then another step and then another that add up like taps on a drum to a rhythm, the rhythm of walking. The most obvious and the most obscure thing in the world, this walking that wanders so readily into religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy, allegory, and heartbreak.
— Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Penguin Books (June 1, 2001)
Photo: Bjorn Breimo, Walking (Norway)
“1 a.m.: Lie here then. Just lie here. What of it? It’s just lying here. Think of good things… Try to calm the banging heart.”
— Samantha Harvey, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping (Grove Press; May 12, 2020)
Notes:
It is astonishing how violently a big branch shakes when a silly little bird has left it.
~ Katherine Mansfield, from “Alors, je pars.” in Delphi Complete Works of Katherine Mansfield
Photo of Common Redpoll (male) by Larissa Datsha
WFH. (Work From Home). No shoes. No socks. Chained to the desk. Lower back groans.
HBR: “The risk is substantial. The lines between work and non-work are blurring… (those) who feel “on” all the time are at a higher risk of burnout when working from home than if they were going to the office as usual.”
I pause for a few page turns of Yiyun Li, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life: “being caught by the mesh of one’s mind.”
Friday Night. 11:30 pm. Everyone in bed – but me. I’ve shifted positions, from desk to couch. I’m clearing out a swollen email box. 214. 210. 198. 175. 143. 138. 117. 18 hours. Calls. Conference Calls. Conference Calls. Conference Calls. 110. 108. 106. 104. 101. 99.
Get up to stretch. Walk to the kitchen. Grab a ramekin. Scoop out 3 heaping tablespoons of Talenti, tamp it down, lean in on the spoon again, add another scoop. Today, Talenti for late breakfast, for dinner, and again, now, at midnight. Mint Chocolate chip. Close eyes. Gelato slides down throat, soothing. The only thing that is.
88. 85. 84. 83. Losing focus. Re-reading same email 2x. Replies are littered with spelling mistakes. Autocorrect, correcting incorrectly. F-** it. I send it anyway. Does it really matter. Lose. Loose. Lose.
81. 79. 64.
Back to Yiyun Li. “Even the most inconsistent person is consistently himself.”
63. 62. 59. 57. 56. 54. 53. Li: “Wanting nothing is as extreme as wanting everything.”
50. 47. 43. 41. Li: “Did we ever ask ourselves: Why are we so lonely, so proud, and so adamant about perfecting our pretense?”
40. 39. 38. 37. 34. 32. Li: “we are, unlike other species, capable of not only enlarging but also diminishing our precarious selves”
30. 29. 27. I’m closing in on clearing my cue, but like Sisyphus, the closer I get to zero, the steeper the hill seems to get.
26. 25. 24. 23. Neck aches. I mean aches. I turn, twist to adjust my position. 23 left. Come on. Bring it home.
I stare at the remaining cue. And stare. And stare.
And quit.
I gently set my iPhone on night stand. Twist in the earbuds, skim to find Chill Playlist, and hit Play. But Yiyun Li can’t help herself, and lip syncs over it.
…the worst kind of fidgeting is that of one’s mind…I wonder…—not that one has known…but that one knows…This ceaseless effort—
Notes: Photo – Shibari & Photo Geoffroy Tako Baud. Model Lafille Delair (via Newthom)
5:33 am. Friday morning.
Google Maps signals 17 minutes to destination. Smooth ride, cruising down I-95 South. Truckers, insomniacs, and DK listening to Audible, his book on tape. More Terry Tempest Williams, her new book, Erosion: Essays of Undoing. Terry’s way in my head, and beyond, and yes, we’re on a first name basis now. “Our undoing is also our becoming. I have come to believe this is a good thing.”
The Heads-up Display on the windshield flashes alert: Object ahead on highway. It flashes an alert again. I tap the brakes.
A wind gust blows leaves across three lanes. I exhale. Wonders of technology. Car warns you about objects on highway, or if you veer outside your lane. I’m listening to books on tape, beamed from the cloud. GPS tells me how long to the office. And I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday.
The car wobbles over uneven pavement. 4000 pounds of car, wearing grooves into the asphalt, with my back and forth 4-5 days a week.
Read somewhere from a survey that 85% of us wished to travel more. And that one in 10 Americans surveyed say they have no interest in going anywhere. Welcome readers, to Me, I’m on top of this stack of 10. [Read more…]
We start out wanting everything, never imagining how much everything weighs. Then we can’t swallow things that eat at our gut. We call this integrity. Then one by one, we’re forced to put things down in order to go on. Like a bird dropping food three times its size in order to fly.
~ Mark Nepo, from “How to Empty” in Things That Join the Sea and the Sky: Field Notes on Living
Notes: